S

andburg had it mostly right, we gather
from Rabbi Benjamin Blech’
s com-
pelling new book, Hope, Not Fear:
Changing the Way We View Death (Rowan
& Littlefield Publishers). To Jewish mys-
tics, death is a promise, not a mockery,
writes the rabbi. What happens to our dead
selves — to our souls, anyway — is poetic,
romantic even. This life is only a prelude,
says Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers), the
anteroom before the afterlife.
Blech is a scholar, a professor of contem-
porary Jewish issues at Yeshiva University,
but, in a conversation at his West Side
apartment, he tells us, “I did not intend
this [as] a book for scholars.
” Rather, at 139
pages, without footnotes but with seven
additional pages of suggested contempo-
rary readings, this slender but splendid
book is conversational, an introduction
to the subject for the ignorant (which is
almost all of us).
Death is almost never mentioned in
classrooms or heard from pulpits. Most
traditional Jews interviewed for this article
doubted or didn’
t know if a dead per-

son was capable of hearing, though both
Talmuds, Bavli and Yerushalmi, say the
dead can.
The 85-year-old Blech writes with the
excitement of a blind person suddenly able
to see the aurora borealis. On every other
page, it seems, he discovers Jewish ideas
about death that are “fascinating,
” “remark-
able” and, after all, what is more fascinating
and remarkable than being convinced that
death is not the end, that our consciousness
and souls survive?
“I intended this book to be helpful to
people, all people,
” says the rabbi. The
Torah itself is strangely coy about the after-
life, though hints are sprinkled throughout
the Bible. The siddur is more explicit: The
Amidah (Shmoneh Esrei), the only prayer
recited morning, afternoon and night,
states definitively, five times in the opening
paragraphs alone, that God is “the resus-
citator of the dead,
” the One who “restores
life,
” keeping His fidelity “to those who
sleep in the dust.
”
The preface to every chapter of Pirkei
Avot states: “
All Israel has a share in the
World to Come.
” Most prayer books
include Maimonides’
“Thirteen Principles
of Faith,
” including the unambiguous affir-
mation: “I believe with complete faith that
there will be a revival of the dead.
”
Blech, who writes a weekly column for
Aish.com, and is the author of the New
York Times best-seller The Sistine Secrets:
Michelangelo’
s Forbidden Messages in the

Heart of the Vatican, tells us, “To under-
stand death is to enter a realm that of
necessity requires faith as a guide.
” Despite
differing theologies, most religions, he says,
“have somehow come to very similar con-
clusions: There is life after this life.
” (Hope,
Not Fear has been endorsed by leaders of
Yeshiva University, St. Peter’
s Seminary and
the Islamic Center of Long Island).

RETHINKING DEATH
Religion and science may seem to be com-
ing at death from different directions, says
Blech, but doctors who didn’
t believe in an
afterlife are being forced to rethink that as
medical advances have proved increasingly
able to revive patients thought to be dead.
“
At a medical conference in Houston,
doctors told me there was a new hospital
rule forbidding doctors, during or after
surgery, from kibbitzing or telling jokes
because there were people who ‘
died’
for 20
minutes, no heartbeat, no brainwaves, who
were able to repeat everything the doctors
said” — and the ‘
dead’
didn’
t always appre-
ciate the doctors’
wisecracks,
” Blech said.
Patients of almost all religions with near-
death experiences, a term that wasn’
t even
used until the 1970s, “shared common
experiences that were inexplicable and uni-
versally consistent,
” Blech says.
In 1975, Dr. Raymond Moody wrote
Life After Life, a book exploring what the
near-dead described: a cessation of pain;
an onset of peacefulness; an out-of-body
experience, such as floating over one’
s own
body; going through a “tunnel”; a mag-
netic, spiritual light force; a review of one’
s
life; meeting relatives or mentors who were
already dead (but never seeing a person
that was still alive); a surge of love.
In Israel, one of the newspapers did a
big story on Moody’
s book in its weekend
edition. After Shabbos, said Blech, a radio
program featuring the then-chief rabbi of
Tel Aviv was fielding call after call: What
about that book? Is there any validity to it?
Blech said the chief rabbi replied, “Not only
does it have validity, this is what Judaism
has been trying to teach the world for
thousands of years.
”
In Genesis, the rabbi adds, “the first thing
God created was light, but the sun wasn’
t
created until Day 4. That first day’
s light
was not light as we know it. Some say it was
the [Heavenly] light we see when we die.
”
In Exodus, says Blech, “Moses asks to see
God, who answers, ‘
Man cannot see Me
and live.
’
In other words, you will see God
[when you will live no more].
”
Blech cited the eulogy given for Apple’
s
Steve Jobs by his sister. Just before Jobs
died, she said, he looked at his loved ones,

28 January 17 • 2019
jn

continued on page 29

JONATHAN MARK SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH NEWS

books
arts&life

“Under the harvest moon,
when the soft
silver
Drips shimmering over
the garden nights,
Death, the gray mocker,
comes and whispers to you
As a beautiful friend who remembers.
”
— Carl Sandburg

New book by Rabbi
Benjamin Blech
challenges common
ideas about death.

Other Side

of Dying

The

KOREN PUBLISHING JERUSALEM

Benjamin

Blech